Sadly I'm at the end of the rope for my discussion of the W.H. Auden poems that I plan to use in my paper for this quarter. The final two works on the docket are "Are you There?" and "Give Me A Doctor." I'm combining them into one post since they are short but sweet (if you think terminal illness is sweet). While they are not extensive, they will in my essay help show the range of topics Auden broached (for "If I could Tell You" this means making the reader's mind explode).
Here is a link to "Are You There?":
http://allpoetry.com/poem/8493059-Are_You_There_-by-W_H_Auden
Let's begin with the less commanding title. "Are You There?" is one of Auden's "love poems." I put love poem in quotation marks because these Auden poems are neither pick up lines nor verse based in Keats' mastery of the emotion of love. For me "Are You There?" was more a statement of what love is for certain people. Right off the bat, the first stanza engages the reader with two possibilities to examine: a person is either alone and forced to think about if they were in love, or a person is in love and forced to think on what would happen if they were alone. Long story short, one is alone or in love. While this stanza is good at hooking the reader, it presents the subject matter simultaneously (always good to kill two birds with one stone). With your undivided attention, Auden then proceeds with a head-scratcher as his next verse. I was unsure as to the precise meaning of these lines upon reading it and rereading it several times. However, once I looked up simulacrum (line 6) on wikipedia, it made sense a little. Simulacrum means "likeness" and is very connotative in that it could refer to an inferior representation of a person or object. In an almost "ah hah!" moment, I figured that the purpose of the second stanza may be to show that dreaming of being with someone is inferior to actually being with that person. Using the same reasoning, the third stanza shoots down Narcissus in an allusion to his tragic tale about loving oneself too much. In a nutshell, the speaker states that it is not rewarding to be self-absorbed and that things are infinitely better when shared in the company of others. The third verse concludes the first half of the poem, which dealt with love in general. The rest of the stanzas look at love from the perspective of children and adults, and then they wrap up the poem with a few lasting remarks. In compare and contrast manner, Auden explores the nature of love's development from childhood to adulthood. The speaker does not seem satisfied with both extremes, which implies that balance (like with anything else) is in order. The last stanza expresses this in the line, "Whatever view we hold." In the most important part of the poem (more lines in this stanza than the rest), the speaker gives the reader an inkling of hope with "perhaps we are not alone." This is the line that left me thinking. Like in Auden's other works, he hits you with a final thought that may leave you cringing or in a contemplative state.
"Give Me a Doctor" also made me think long and hard. Here it is reproduced for your dining pleasure:
Give me a doctor partridge-plump,
Short in the leg and broad in the rump,
An endomorph with gentle hands
Who'll never make absurd demands
That I abandon all my vices
Nor pull a long face in a crisis,
But with a twinkle in his eye Will tell me that I have to die.
Now you may not have thought about this on first read, but after a few times, I picked up on the problem with the second to last line. The preceding lines seem to fit for a woman doctor, but yet it says "twinkle in his eye." This poem just got a little deeper (uh oh!). On the literal level it's a day in the life for doctors in the in-patient ward of a hospital where a person (unknown gender) is terminally ill. However, Auden messed with us in that we are unsure if the speaker is homosexual like he was or if the narrator is a woman, in which case the oddity was a false alarm. In my opinion, the first possibility is more likely because Auden was known to have been a homosexual and this could have been a way to show that it is not a bad thing. Back in his time, people did not easily "come out of the closet," which means that he would have to hide any message related to homosexuality deep in his poems. I just thought that that was an interesting observation. This is probably not central to "Give Me a Doctor," but it does make for some good irony. Rather, I think the big picture purpose is to reveal insight into what it is like to be on the brink of death in a hospital environment. You either have brutally honest doctors that crush patients with reality or the ones that plant false hopes of survival. What the speaker seems to want is a middle-ground doctor, one that will tell him that he will die, but in the right way. This goes for any terminally ill patient. One must break the news in the correct way or else all hell breaks loose. It's also shown that the looks of the doctor are important as well. First impressions are everything! What helped me understand this work was to put the images and personality traits in the first six lines together and see what they show about a doctor and then connect that with the last line. Speaking of connections, I successfully related homosexuality to terminal illness. Score!!
Anyway, I'm about ready to write this paper on a poet whose works I enjoyed immensely.
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